The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

In the bizarre world of Franz Kafka, salesmen turn into giant bugs, apes give lectures at college academies, and nightmares probe the mysteries of modern humanity’s unhappiness. More than any other modern writer in world literature, Kafka captures the loneliness and misery that fill the lives of 20th-century humanity.

The Castle

The story of K - the unwanted land surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle and yet cannot go home - seems to depict, like a dream from the deepest recesses of consciousness, an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. A perpetual human condition lies at the heart of this labyrinthine world: dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, reason and nonsense, harmony and disintegration.

The Metamorphosis: A New Translation by Susan Bernofsky

Franz Kafka's 1915 novella of unexplained horror and nightmarish transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. It is the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This hugely influential work inspired George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Louis Borges, and Ray Bradbury, while continuing to unsettle millions of readers.

The Castle

A land-surveyor, known only as K., arrives at a small village permanently covered in snow and dominated by a castle to which access seems permanently denied. K.'s attempts to discover why he has been called constantly run up against the peasant villagers, who are in thrall to the absurd bureaucracy that keeps the castle shut, and the rigid hierarchy of power among the self-serving bureaucrats themselves.

The Stranger

Albert Camus' The Stranger is one of the most widely read novels in the world, with millions of copies sold. It stands as perhaps the greatest existentialist tale ever conceived, and is certainly one of the most important and influential books ever produced. Now, for the first time, this revered masterpiece is available as an unabridged audio production.

The Metamorphosis

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” With this startlingly bizarre sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young traveling salesman who, transformed overnight into a giant, beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. Rather than being surprised at the transformation, the members of his family despise it as an impending burden upon themselves.

The Plague

In the small coastal city of Oran, Algeria, rats begin rising up from the filth, only to die as bloody heaps in the streets. Shortly after, an outbreak of the bubonic plague erupts and envelops the human population. Albert Camus' The Plague is a brilliant and haunting rendering of human perseverance and futility in the face of a relentless terror born of nature.

Brave New World

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

The Brothers Karamazov [Naxos AudioBooks Edition]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a titanic figure among the world's great authors, and The Brothers Karamazov is often hailed as his finest novel. A masterpiece on many levels, it transcends the boundaries of a gripping murder mystery to become a moving account of the battle between love and hate, faith and despair, compassion and cruelty, good and evil.

Amerika: The Missing Person: A New Translation by Mark Harman Based on the Restored Text

A Brilliant new translation of the great writer's least Kafkaesque novel, based on a German-language text that was produced by a team of international scholars and that is more faithful to Kafka's original manuscript than anything we have had before. With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his translation of Kafka's The Castle, the award-winning translator Mark Harman now restores the humor and particularity of language to Amerika.

1984: New Classic Edition

George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominated by Big Brother and its vast network of agents, including the Thought Police - a world in which news is manufactured according to the authorities' will and people live tepid lives by rote. Winston Smith, a hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system in which privacy does not exist and where those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death, he knows there is no hope for him.

Crime and Punishment

A century after it first appeared, Crime and Punishment remains one of the most gripping psychological thrillers. A poverty-stricken young man, seeing his family making sacrifices for him, is faced with an opportunity to solve his financial problems with one simple but horrifying act: the murder of a pawnbroker. She is, he feels, just a parasite on society. But does the end justify the means? Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov makes his decision and then has to live with it.

Metamorphosis

As travelling salesman Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard - as if it were armor-plated - back, and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments, on top of which the bed quilt could hardly stay in place and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.

The Sound and the Fury

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling", the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers: the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin, and the monstrous Jason.

Ulysses

Ulysses is regarded by many as the single most important novel of the 20th century. It tells the story of one day in Dublin, June 16th 1904, largely through the eyes of Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman. Both begin a normal day, and both set off on a journey around the streets of Dublin, which eventually brings them into contact with one another.

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every minute of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty, and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the public in Europe, and later in America.

Catch-22

Catch-22 is set in the closing months of World War II, in an American bomber squadron on a small island off Italy. Its hero is a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn't even met keep trying to kill him. (He has decided to live forever, even if he has to die in the attempt.)

Fathers and Sons

When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naïve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father by criticizing the landowning way of life and by his outspoken determination to sweep away traditional values of contemporary Russian society.

Notes from the Underground

A predecessor to such monumental works as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground represents a turning point in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing toward the more political side. In this work, we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who, disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives, withdraws from that society into the underground.

The Idiot [Blackstone]

Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal, and murder follow, testing the wreckage left by human misery to find "man in man."

Notes from the Underground

Notes from the Underground is an 1864 existentialist novella written by the Russian author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The speaker, an unknown yet common type of man, writes in first person about his views on Western philosophy, as well as his stark analysis of his own life. The work is written as the ramblings of this retired government employee who seems to have a very pessimistic yet honest opinion on his own life, as well as the world as seen through his eyes.

The Trial

One of the great works of the 20th century, Kafka's The Trial has been read as a study of political power, a pessimistic religious parable, or a crime novel where the accused man is himself the problem. In it, a man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. Faced with this ambiguous but threatening situation, Josef K. gradually succumbs to its psychological pressure.

Factotum

One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.

Publisher's Summary

If Max Brod had obeyed Franz Kafka's dying request, Kafka's unpublished manuscripts would have been burned, unread. Fortunately, Brod ignored his friend's wishes and published The Trial, which became the author's most famous work. Now Kafka's enigmatic novel regains its humor and stylistic elegance in a new translation based on the restored original manuscript.

Thirty-year-old Josef K., a financial officer in a European city bank, is suddenly arrested. He is subjected to hearings, questioning, and visits from officials. Defending his innocence against charges that are never explained to him, he watches his life dissolve into absurdity. Whether read as an existential tale or a parable, this haunting story stands out as one of the great novels of our time.

Breon Mitchell, a professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, has received national awards for his literary translations. The renewed energy and power of this classic work are complemented by veteran narrator George Guidall's superb performance.

What made the experience of listening to The Trial the most enjoyable?

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the novel is the humor that Kafka injected into the story. As an example, the protagonist, Joseph K. is advised to meet with the court painter, of all people, in order to get a detailed explanation of the secret workings of the lower court hearing his case. After the painter provides Joseph K. with a long, absurd and incomprehensible explanation of the court proceedings, he manages to browbeat K. into buying three of his paintings which are exactly the same. This is very funny section of the novel.

What did you like best about this story?

There is one absurd scene after another in this novel. They are often simultaneously hilarious and frightening. Not many writers can achieve that effect,

What about George Guidall’s performance did you like?

George Guidall manages to capture Joseph K's growing despair and resignation through his voice inflections.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

After spending months fighting against unspecified charges, convinced that he has done nothing wrong, an exhausted Joseph K. accepts his fate.

Any additional comments?

I like this relatively new (1998) translation by Breon Mitchell. I checked it againt the restored German text and it seems to be much more accurate than the earlier translation by Willa and Edwin Muir.

I really don't know how to review this book. Every sentence, maybe every word, holds so much symbolic meaning and so much warning for the readers that it is a heavy read. It weighs me down just thinking about it. At the same time, it is a very important book, and one that should be read by anyone who considers him/herself well read. The book is translated from German, by the German author, Franz Kafka. It is frightening from the standpoint that the protagonist, "K," cannot make sense of what is happening to him, and nothing that he can do has any impact on his own life. He is innocent of any crime, yet he is arrested for some unknown offense which he never learns. The trial takes a whole year, but never amounts to anything concrete. Meanwhile, K is free to come and go as he pleases. He goes back to work, and tries to figure out some way of defending himself, but to no avail. Over the course of the year, his mental state deteriorates because of the uncertainty of his status and the hopelessness he feels because he has no control over his own life. I compare the book to "Alice in Wonderland" because nothing is what it seems. The ending is just unreal, and perhaps is a foreshadowing of what happens later in Germany during the Holocaust, another place where nothing is what it seems, and life stops making sense.

It is a disturbing story, and one that could become a reality for any of us if we continue to allow our freedom to be eroded. That is the frightening part.

No novel will ever approach THE TRIAL in giving one a special and necessary appreciation for our legal criminal system and our Bill of Rights.

Gripe if you will, but imagine you are charged with a crime tomorrow, but no one will tell you what that crime is, what criminal act you committed, who accused you, who or what was harmed, or when your trial will take place. Then, when you talk to court workers and even your own lawyer, it's a foregone conclusion that you will be found guilty and your best hope is to drag out the process as long as you can just to STAY ALIVE on this crazy train.

A historic, nightmarish novel that plants in its reader bad-dream seeds that may not germinate for years, but they will. Oh yes, they will.

At first I was worried I wouldn't find this book interesting but I couldn't have been more wrong. It was completely gripping, thought-provoking, and terrifying. It was written about 100 years ago but it is so relevant it could have just as easily been written last week. If you like dystopian novels I would recommend, even though this is not explicitly dystopian it definitely reads like it is at moments. It also made me appreciate the United States Court System despite how flawed it is at times. I highly recommend this book.

I think about how often this novel has been imitated, especially in film. So much of the imagery, scenery, situations, and nightmare-like qualities has been copied and parodied to the point that it's amazing the (somewhat pejorative) term 'Kafkaesque' actually has any meaning at all.

Yet even though some of these bizarre images are well known to us now, they are nevertheless still as powerful as they were when Kafka fever-dreamed these words onto the page. And the reason why is that you have to experience this novel as a whole, get caught up in it, go on trial with Joseph K., and judge him page after page. The spell is in the words, in the way Kafka immediately arrests you in the very first sentence of the novel and never lets you go. No homage or parody even comes close to conveying the frightening paranoia, the claustrophobic closeness, the gloomy heat and fog, the grinding and wearing down of K (and us), the confusion, and the logic that has no logic.

Of course Kafka wasn't onto anything exactly new; bureaucracy and all the complaining about its red tape goes back as long as there has been a civilization. But what Kafka does bring new to the table, a table set by Gogol, waited by Dostoevsky, and later cleaned up by Solzhenitsyn, is describe the insidious hilarity of the proceedings of modern life.

Gogol, in Dead Souls and The Overcoat, saw the absurdity in the bureaucracy of 'the system'. Dostoevsky saw how the man was judged by it, and Solzhenitsyn experienced first-hand the oppression of 'the system'. Where Kafka fits neatly in is that he predicted how those in power could obfuscate what the rest of us took for granted as a clear and moral system (the law) and pervert it towards their own end. Gogol's hero in Dead Souls merely took advantage of a loophole but wished to make good on the deception, he wasn't out to hurt anyone. Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, was guilty as hell and the system used cunning, clever and a big stick to get him to admit his crime, but the law was still just even if it was oppressive. Solzhenitsyn (Ivan Denisovich), was innocent, but Kafka had foreseen the future where the guilty were all innocent (and in charge) and the innocent were all guilty (and powerless). Kafka bridges the gap not only through art and literature, but in reality, too.

But Kafka does much more than his comrades; he manages to capture much more than a snapshot of a system gone bad, he captures the irrationality, the total labyrinthine and convulsed logic of the gatekeepers, and the out-of-control nature of the machine. No other writer has been able to capture the very feeling of a dream, to hold together a series of disjointed ghosts that connect in a foggy logic that totally falls apart the moment you wake up. And that's what Kafka was hoping for too, he wanted the reader, and to a greater extent, the entire world to wake up from the nightmare.

Yet that was not to be, and he was never that optimistic. He understood that even those who were in power were totally helpless against the system anymore. Nobody is in charge of the system because the system runs itself.

The best way to explain it to modern readers is to imagine the recent financial crisis and how impossible it has been to actually figure out whose fault it all was. The homeowners blame the banks because the banks gave cheap, poorly vetted loans. The banks claim they did nothing illegal and were only providing for their customers who wanted loans and whose paperwork was, legally, in order. Besides, the people who own the banks were, in fact, the homeowners who had 401k's and stocks and other financial products in the banks that were in everyone's best interest to continue out-performing last year's numbers. And the lowly bank clerk would not turn down a loan because he was afraid he'd lose his job for not making quota - and same for his boss. And the men at the top? They had to keep reporting to the share holders who demanded better returns.

And on and on and in a circle and nobody was to blame because it was all out of control by slight degrees.

And that's what Kafka was getting at here in the Trial. That's why the Trial was not a legal proceeding in the way we understand it, but a social one, a trial of one's own character, a trial where the only was to be declared innocent is to admit you are guilty because we are all guilty of one thing or another. It's like littering: one person tossing their coffee cup out their speeding car window does not make a major difference, but 100,000 drivers doing it one just one highway everyday for 10 years makes a huge mess. Oh sure, YOU might not be the problem because it's all those other people, but we are all the straw that breaks the camel's back.

We twist our own knife, either by never taking responsibility or by never changing the system, hard as that may seem. Yet if there is any doubt how terrible it can all turn out for each of us, look no further than Solzhenitsyn who suffered so much in the Gulag, or even Kafka's own family just a few years after his work was published - they all died in the concentration camp. Who stepped in to change those systems? Nobody. And they couldn't help themselves, they were truly innocent, but the world sat on its hands and did nothing. We were all guilty.

And we will be guilty again, too. We may never see concentration camps and wars like the 1940's again, but we still live in an absurd world with absurd rules and we don't really struggle against it too much because we've learned to be complacent, we've learned to sit on that stool next to the door and let the doorkeeper keep us out solely because he said we cannot enter.

One final thought: like Dead Souls, this novel is also an unfinished work and though it would be impossible to predict what Gogol or Kafka would have accomplished had they finished their masterpieces, the way they are left to us seem almost more complete than had they had been all wrapped up with a nice ending. I like that there is no real resolution, or, at least in The Trial, I love the disjointed nature of each scene, how characters come and go and how one thing that is important on one page is utterly forgotten on the next. It's as imperfect and incomplete as the world we live in.

This is one book that may be better to read in print, I found it a bit hard to follow in audio format. For anyone not familiar with the story however, it is a very intersting take on living in a world full of rules, rules that only become apparent when someone else decides you have broken them. An excellent metaphor for much of modern life.

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